The first paragraph of The New York Times's obituary for Vincent Harding, scholar and co-author of Martin Luther King's brilliant and always-relevant anti-war speech, "Beyond Vietnam," refers to that speech as "polarizing" and notes that it "touched off a firestorm," condemned by Life Magazine and the NAACP.
Not mentioned is the Times's own exquisitely condescending editorial, "Dr. King's Error," which is just awful in just the ways you'd expect. the war is a very complicated issue, you see, and calling for peace is just too simplistic. Yes, there have been some horrors, but calling them war crimes is just a bridge too far. And besides, civil rights is hard enough, anyways. (I'm sure King was grateful for that needed reminder.) The connection between Vietnam and the war on poverty is "too facile" - the real obstacles are "conservatives" and "the intractability of slum mores and habits."
The obituary also describes the anti-war position in 1967 as "relatively unpopular." As Penny Lewis outlines in her important study of the anti-war movement, support for immediate withdrawal was indeed low in the Spring of 1967, reaching a low point of six percent. But by the end of 1968, the majority supported and end to the war and by 1970 the majority had come to support immediate withdrawal. Yet the the Times' obituary, referring to the "furor" and "firestorm" the speech caused, finds it notable that "neither Dr. Harding nor Dr. King disavowed the address." Given their success in convincing the American public in the face of ridicule from the elite, a better question might be if the Times has ever disavowed theirs.
